Ruscha, showing a surprising interest in the new abstract painting, has canceled out phrases appropriated from gangster movies - «You Cross Me I Wan na See Blood» - on small canvases,
producing Suprematist - like abstractions.
It was also a moment in which he began to consider and truly digest the work of important abstractionists from all over, from the boxy squares of the Russian
suprematist Kazimir Malevich (which he had admired at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam) to the effusive drips of Jackson Pollock to the mosaic - like canvases
produced by the African American color field painter Sam Gilliam.